NEW YORK – Show New Yorkers a checkout line and they’ll tell you whether it’s worth the wait.

Starbucks at 9 a.m.? Eight minutes, head to the next one down the street. Duane Reade pharmacy at 6 p.m.? Twelve minutes, come back in the morning.

But now a relative newcomer to Manhattan is trying to teach the locals a new rule of living: The longer the line, the shorter the wait.

Come again?

For its first stores here, Whole Foods, the upscale supermarket, directs customers to form serpentine single lines that feed into a passel of cash registers.

Banks have used a similar system for decades. But supermarkets, fearing a long line will scare off shoppers, have generally favored that old stalwart, the one-line-per-register system.

By 7 p.m. on any given weeknight, the lines at each of the four Whole Foods stores in Manhattan can be 50 deep, but they zip along faster than most lines with 10 people.

Because shoppers stand in the same line, waiting for a register to become available, there are no “slow” lines, delayed by a coupon-counting customer or languid cashier. And since Whole Foods charges premium prices for its organic fare, it can afford to staff dozens of cash registers, making the line move even faster.

“Oh God, no way,” is how Maggie Fitzgerald recalled her first reaction to the line at the Whole Foods in Columbus Circle. For weeks, Fitzgerald, 26, would not shop there alone, assigning a friend to fill a grocery cart while she stood in line.

When she discovered the wait was usually about four minutes, rather than 20, she began shopping by herself, and found it faster than her old supermarket.

The science of keeping lines moving, known as queue management, is a big deal to big business. In just a short time, Whole Foods stores in the city won bragging rights as the top sellers among grocery chains here, with sales of $42 million a store last year, according to Modern Grocer, a trade publication.

Some of its competitors acknowledge that they are feeling a bit of line envy. “I should give it a closer look,” said John Catsimatidis, owner of the Gristede’s chain, which uses the traditional line system.

Lines can also hurt retailers. Starbucks suffered a serious sales dip last summer when lines for its cold beverages scared off customers. Wal-Mart, too, has said that slow checkouts have turned off many shoppers.

And they are easily turned off. Research has shown that consumers routinely perceive the wait to be far longer than it actually is.

“We have good clocks in our heads for roughly three minutes,” said Paco Underhill, founder of Envirosell, a retail consulting firm, and author of “Why We Buy,” a book about shopping.

“Once we get beyond that, time expands wildly,” he said. “If somebody is there for 4.5 minutes and you ask them how long they waited, they will say 15 minutes.”

In most of the United States, the wait in a grocery store checkout line is negligible – under a minute, Underhill has found. Then there is New York City.

Whole Foods executives spent months drawing up designs for a new line system in New York that would be unlike anything in their suburban stores, where shoppers form one line in front of each register.

That traditional system, they determined, would take up too much valuable space and could not handle the crowds they expected in their new stores.

The single-line, bank-style system was quickly chosen for its statistical efficiency.

But Whole Foods did not stop there. It paired that system with possibly the largest number of cash registers in the city, more than 30 for each store, and it hired an army of cashiers to staff them throughout the day (including “floaters” to fill in for cashiers who need a bathroom break, or a respite from shoppers who want to know why the organic free-range chicken is not local).

The result is one of the fastest grocery store lines in the city. An unscientific survey by a New York Times reporter found that at peak shopping times – Sunday, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. – a line at one Whole Foods checked out a person every 4.5 seconds, compared with 19.6 seconds for a line at Trader Joe’s.

Granted, it may not be an apples-to-organic-apples comparison, but when faced with a line of 50 people, it takes about four minutes to check out at Whole Foods, half the time at competing chains with significantly shorter lines

“Whole Foods has just figured it out,” said Kelli Wicker, 38, who waited less than two minutes to buy $15 worth of groceries at the Whole Foods at Union Square, despite a line of more than a dozen people.

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